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How Nostalgia Made Me Stop Hating My Mother’s China

While her mother was alive, columnist Michelle Slatalla spurned her prized English Singapore Bird china. Today she scours the internet for replacements

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Michelle Slatalla

Aug. 15, 2018 1:11 p.m. ET

BY REASSEMBLING my mother’s lost china set, I cannot reassemble my mother. I am aware of that. In fact, when she was alive I told her repeatedly I did not want 12 place settings of Adams’s Singapore Bird pattern, in which said bird was perched on a flowery branch against a pale blue background. Things are just things, I told her. There was nothing blue in my house. And food looks best served on plain white plates.

“You could paint the dining room blue,” she suggested one time. “A sky-blue pink would be a nice backdrop to...